Fathers & Sons & Sports (14 page)

Fathers and sons have been competing since before dirt and, I imagine, have always experienced the same conflicted emotions. There is little to add to this oedipal saga; it’s an ancient story. For sons, there is the thrill of holding your own in the world of men. But the price paid is a heavy one. To claim your prize, you must vanquish the god of your childhood. The strongest man on earth, the dad who can whip all other dads, must be brought down, made ordinary and all too human. Fathers, however proud of their progeny’s success, recognize this defeat as a small death, a painful step down a road with a certain end. My mother surely felt this, and as I returned to thrashing around in the deep end and my father climbed slowly out of the pool, I saw her approach with a towel and place it tenderly over his shoulders.

It wasn’t till later that evening that the question arose: “Did you do one of those flip turns?”

Summer was nearly over. Through some sort of unspoken understanding, neither Dad nor I requested a rematch. Soon the weather would turn chill and I would be back in school. By the following summer, one year older and that much stronger, I would be out of reach. My father and I never raced again.

And that was nearly that. But four years later, there would be one final struggle, an epic arm-wrestling match fought to a stalemate on the coral-colored shag of my parents’ dressing room. My mother was reduced to the role of nervous spectator—there was no need for an official start, just a quick, synchronized one-two-three-go. In years past, these matches had followed a set routine: Dad would allow me to slowly push his arm over nearly horizontal, then recover to the vertical, where I would struggle to exhaustion before he gently vanquished me. This time, nobody was faking it.

Naturally, my father had an arm-wrestling story. A few years earlier, as governor, he had traveled to Petaluma, California, for the World Arm-Wrestling Championships. A photographer had posed him with one of the contenders as if they were competing. In the interest of realism—or perhaps out of sheer perversity—he then suggested they “y’know, go at it a little.” Dad may have been overly enthusiastic. The following day, his office got a call from the competition. My father had broken the man’s arm.

We would battle for several long minutes, faces inches apart, neither of us able to budge the other, till veins bulged and sweat ran into our eyes. I think we were both stunned at how ferociously we were fighting just to keep from being outdone. By this time, my mother had seen enough. “Stop it! Stop it!” The anxiety in her voice brought both of us up short. We agreed to call it a draw, and that was that. I can still see us sprawled on the rug, panting, in the afterglow of combat. Dad’s face had a slightly surprised look. Truthfully, I felt a bit ashamed. I was old enough by then to grasp that continuing to push and challenge would verge on cruelty. There was no longer any point. It was over.

In years to come, neither my father nor I ever referred to our arm-wrestling match. It may as well not have happened. Our earlier swimming race, however, attained an honored place in family lore. Again and again, the story would bubble up in conversation, usually at Dad’s instigation. My victory was always gracefully acknowledged, and I always responded that I’d had a great teacher. But the flip turn, as it transpired, had become a useful, face-saving asterisk for Dad. Yes, I’d won, but by employing a technique not practiced in his day. Were it not for that … who knows?

That my father should have recalled our race with such clarity no longer surprises me. The unimaginable so easily becomes the unforgettable. Seemingly ageless, accustomed to prevailing over time and nature, Dad did not yet feel old enough that long-ago afternoon to be beaten up and down the pool by a son who
was still too young. Over the years, my father and I had raced each other countless times; all but one run together in a blur. His loss, so unexpected for both of us, sealed our memory.

Late summer, 1995. Another pool. My father and I sat beneath the shade of our umbrella, squinting out into the afternoon light. Alzheimer’s will have its inexorable way, and Dad seldom swam anymore. Now there was mostly the past, some of it fading, some not.

“It was your flip turn that did it. Till then, you know, we were even.”

Watching the sun beat down on the water, casting its net of light over the bottom of the pool, I didn’t bother to turn in his direction.

“Yes, we were even.”

t was Super Bowl Sunday, the only day of the year my mother served dinner in front of the television set. She knew that my father had a vested financial interest in the game and that I was a boy who cared deeply about sports. So she conceded: dinner in the living room, in front of the Trinitron. I suspect she enjoyed it.

The menu was a concession, too, solely for me this time. Gone was our usual midwinter Southern Italian Sunday feast: a
homemade
ragu
over rigatoni, with braciola, sausage, broccoli rabe on the side and a carafe of Valpolicella. No, on this day, my mother, ever so desperate to put meat on my little bones, served up my favorite: roast beef, potatoes, Boston lettuce and mountains of green beans sauted with garlic and olive oil.

My older sister refused to take part. She always hated two things—red meat and sports. Above all, she hated my father’s gambling, the ebb and flow of anxiety that came with it, the screaming matches it provoked between my parents, the dark silences after a bad day at “the office,” the absurdity of risking our future on Tampa Bay or TCU or some horse, maybe Foolish Pleasure.

For my father, gambling and bookmaking was a second job, his clandestine second life. He had been gambling in some form or another since FDR’s second term. By the 1980s, it had become his main source of income.

On that Super Bowl Sunday in 1984, in our Bronx apartment, twenty-two stories above the rickety treetops, the three of us—my parents and I—watched the Washington Redskins play the Los Angeles Raiders. The Redskins were the defending title-holders and a three-point favorite. My father wagered heavily on the Raiders. How heavily, I don’t know; I knew not to ask.

He never had favorite teams—gamblers and bookmakers can’t get attached, can’t afford to—but he had a thing for the Raiders. Kenny Stabler might have started it; my father had a
predilection for lefties. And the Raiders were always the bad guys. That helped.

Washington had the self-aggrandizing quarterback Joe Theismann and the impudent receiving corps known as the Smurfs. The Raiders had the stoic Tom Flores and the unfashionable Jim Plunkett—two scions of industrious Chicano laborers who came up the hard way.

In the third quarter, when the game was still a game, there was a play—a very famous play. Perhaps you remember it. Marcus Allen, bright, young, stealthy, took a handoff from Plunkett. He ran left to the line of scrimmage, saw it was clogged, “stopped on a dime,” spun 180 degrees to the right, got a feeble but well-intentioned block from the creaky-limbed Plunkett and turned upfield. For a few interminable seconds, we didn’t talk, we didn’t chew, we didn’t breathe. Our eyes widened, and we watched Marcus Allen run. He kept on running, a silver streak, away from the pack for some seventy yards and a touchdown. Roasted potatoes flew into the air, and green beans, and shouts of joy. My sister, eavesdropping, came out of her room, relieved. For now it was apparent the Raiders would win. Her perpetually overdue tuition at Clark University would be paid. Outside, the Bronx resonated with horns and howls, at least our multiracial, multiethnic, occasionally tensioned corner of the Bronx, an eyesore of gray schematic towers called Co-op City. Marcus Allen saved the world that night.

This is what it was like to live with a bookmaker. When my father won, we saw things. Doors opened, views expanded. He liked to think of himself as a capitalist hero. He would tell us over dinner that he “made the wheels turn.” For him, money was something you enjoyed. It went to things like books, food, wine, delicacies, opera tickets, music lessons, and trips to museums—in Delft.

How much did my father win? There was never a final tally, not that Sunday nor any other. As in any business, he had a gross and a net, the difference being how much he owed. When he didn’t win, when things hit rock bottom, bills would not be paid. The fee for his gallbladder surgery at New York Hospital in 1977 wasn’t settled until the early ‘90s. He’d go six months without paying the phone bill and the telephone company would shut off our service or at least prevent us from making outgoing calls. “God forbid of an emergency” my mother would say.

To buy time, my father raised the already fine art of check bouncing to something metaphysical. Eventually, people wouldn’t accept anything but cash from him. He probably averted trouble, narrowly, a dozen times, maybe more. What kind of trouble, I’m not sure. I know he borrowed from people, maybe bad people, borrowed from one to pay another.

When I worked up the gumption, and as I child I wasn’t blessed with gumption, I’d ask how much he’d won or lost and he’d simply say, “Don’t worry” or “Worry about your school-work.” By the time I was in college, I was more aggressive in my
questioning, especially when I’d meet him on a corner near the NYU campus in the final hour of late registration, two weeks into the semester, and he’d be in a cold, panicked sweat, bank check in hand, with me thinking he’d have a stroke between Greene and Mercer. He was fifty-eight then, no longer permitted to have a credit card. I was eighteen, a freshman in college, making four-something an hour at the NYU bookstore, and I had my choice of Visa, Mastercard or Discover. He wouldn’t answer. He would just turn reticent.

My mother tried to save. She would stash what she could in her James Beard cookbook so he couldn’t get to it, squander it on the early daily double. She made my sister and me swear not to tell him where the money was. Not that there was much: a few fives, tens and twenties. Just enough to pay the pharmacist and maybe a taxi driver if sickly me needed to see Dr. Printz on Burke Avenue. When my mother knew my father was short on cash—that is, when he came to me or my sister for change to buy subway tokens-she began to worry. As far as I know, he never did try to uncover her cache, not unless he searched the house at night, when we were all asleep. He never could sleep very well.

Other people, most others we knew, had assets—houses, cars, savings or retirement accounts: “security,” as my mother would say. Even my father’s “customers”—that’s what he called them—had plenty put away. Mostly Wall Street types, Jews, Italians, Irish, the odd WASP, they gambled simply for sport. One of them, my mother reminded us, had a Swiss bank
account. A Swiss bank account!” My father borrowed from his pension and his IRA.

“It’s not normal,” she’d say loudly, decrying our lifestyle.

“I know it’s not normal,” he’d say.

Sure it was odd, but it was all we knew. My sister and I couldn’t have friends over between six and eight at night, between noon and two on weekends. Our phones—we had two extensions, one private, one for the customers—would ring off the hook. It would look suspicious to visitors.

Not that our neighbors could afford to pass judgment. Co-op City had a cast of 55,000 oddball characters. Who drank, who smacked around his wife, who was a degenerate horseplayer, who was a petty gossip, who never should have been a parent, who scrawled graffiti in the stairwells, who pissed in the elevators, who was a corrupt cop or a junkie-to-be—this was common knowledge in Co-op City. We had no Main Street or Pine Street or Fourth of July parade. Just cherry bombs in garbage cans. But my family seemed odd to the oddballs. We were the freaks. Jetting off one day, finding eviction notices on the door the next. Steven, half-Italian, half-Jewish, would ask me in third grade, “Is your father in the Mafia?” The kids, even teachers, would look at me and wait for a response. They didn’t know what to think when we went round the room, reporting on summer vacations. Everyone else said Lake George or Shorehaven. I said Lisbon or Rabat or Amsterdam. My teachers thought what Steven thought. They had the same mentality as a third grader.